Black Agenda Radio – 03.11.19

Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Glen Ford, along with my co-host Nellie Bailey. Coming up: A supporter of Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar says Democratic leadership is on a collision course with the party’s voter base; a supporter of sex workers in South Africa talks about the priorities of African feminists; and, we’ll hear from a political activist organizing in the bowels of the U.S. prison gulag.

Advocates for community control of the police in Chicago took the battle to the electoral arena, last month, fielding candidates in each of the city’s 50 city council districts. Before the February 26th election, only one city councilman could be counted on to support C-PAC, the proposed Civilian Police Accoutability Commission. But Frank Chapman, of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, says community control advocates are now a force to be reckoned with.

Ilhan Omar has only represented Minneapolis in the U.S. Congress since January, but Democratic Party leadership has already targeted her with two congressional Resolutions, indirectly charging Omar with anti-Semitism because of her criticism of the Israel lobby. Shahid Buttar is a lawyer and human rights activist, and a former director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Buttar plans to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the upcoming Democratic primary, in San Francisco. He says Democratic leadership is trying to show leftish members of the party who’s boss.

Women in Africa are reshaping what it means to be a feminist. Nkozo Yingwana is a doctoral student and researcher for the African SexWorker Alliance. Yingwana identifies as an African feminist scholar-activist. She wrote a recent essay on sex work and feminism in Africa, titled, “We Fit in the Society by Force.”

Last month, hundreds of inmates froze for days in their cells when power went out at the infamous Metropolitan Detention Center, or MDC, in Brooklyn, New York. Black Agenda Radio producer Kyle Fraser spoke with a federal prisoner who is organizing behind the bars with IWOC, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, and who spent time at MDC and wrote an essay on the power failure. He calls himself John Brown 912.